By Stephen O’Reilly
EFFORTS to tackle online scams are futile without buy-in from social media companies according to Jaap Van der Molen, head of ABN AMRO Bank’s Detecting Financial Crime unit.
Speaking at the AML Intelligence European Anti-Financial Crime Summit in Dublin, Mr Van der Molen described “a fair proportion” of social media users as “scammers” who employ the AI and algorithmic capabilities of platforms to target individuals.
This produces “financial transactions that we detect and consider fraudulent”, he added.
“About 70% of scams originate in social media. And so, any conversation without these parties in the room is futile from our perspective” Van der Molen said.
He noted that Revolut reported that 44% of the fraud it detected emanated from social media. Meta previously acknowledged that illicit content, including scams, contribute approximately 10% of its revenue.
Effect of AI on bank staffing
Mr Van der Molen also touched on the staffing implications for financial institutions of AI-enhanced fraud. Given the prevalence of identity fraud, he highlighted how AI had increased the scope for document manipulation.
“It touches mortgage fraud, credit related fraud, notary statements, financial statements – everything can be made with AI.”
Describing AI’s advancement as “an arms race”, Van der Molen emphasised the need for analysts within financial institutions to keep pace with developments and ensure that “every time they find something we miss… we catch it the next time.”
He warned that “there’s definitely no silver bullet at the moment.”
Questioned on whether the gradual development of AI solutions and risk mitigation tools would lead to a reduction in the staffing levels of financial crime compliance units, Van der Molen acknowledged that this was likely. However, he highlighted the potential for AI tools to free up analysts to reduce the amount of time spent on administrative tasks.
“What we’re actually trying to do is make sure that the people that we have in our detection and financial crime unit do as much risk relevant work as they possibly can.”
Insisting that such tools would remain “human led”, he said that generative AI, in particular, created opportunities for analysts to “really look at unstructured data” and engage in much more evaluation while reducing the time spent on administrative tasks such as searching document archives.
“We will do the work with fewer people, but I think the story should really be about how we’re going to become more effective at risk-management.”
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